


I'm Only Here for the Boos

by miraclebee



Series: (Holi Holi Holi) Holiday AUs [2]
Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Alcohol, Fluff, Halloween, M/M, Multi, Seventeen is in a Frat, Swearing, but they can be if you want, so I guess its a college au, some ships aren't romantic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-29
Updated: 2019-10-29
Packaged: 2021-01-06 06:00:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21221738
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miraclebee/pseuds/miraclebee
Summary: Halloween is getting closer and the members of Sigma Nu Tau are getting spoopy.





	I'm Only Here for the Boos

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "What the hell are you doing?"
> 
> “What do you mean ‘What the hell am I doing’? I’m making a jack-o’-lantern, dumbass,” Jeonghan replies smoothly, using the back of his hand to sweep the hair off of his face because his fingers are kind of sticky.
> 
> “I mean what the hell are you doing with paint?” Chan spits out the last word like its poison.

“What the hell are you doing?”

Sometimes when you’re friends with someone since childhood, Jeonghan muses, their voice has this grating quality that really has no rival. And Chan’s voice is really just extraordinary. High-pitched and obviously scandalized, his tone has Jeonghan’s skin crawling in aggravation. And the fact that Jeonghan knows that _Chan _knows that he has this affect on the older man makes him even more annoyed.

“What do you mean ‘What the hell am_ I_ doing’? _I’m_ making a jack-o’-lantern, dumbass,” Jeonghan replies smoothly, using the back of his hand to sweep the hair off of his face because his fingers are kind of sticky.

He doesn’t try to hide his annoyance, but he’ll be damned if it all doesn’t fade into the background when he turns around and sees how cute Chan is right now. He’s wearing a simple sweatshirt and jeans with sneakers combo, but he’s wearing some glasses without lenses that he probably borrowed from Minghao and his hair looks nice and fluffy. Chan is, without a doubt, cute. But telling him that either always ends in Jeonghan getting smacked or Chan’s ego inflating even more, so Jeonghan keeps it to himself. For now.

But to top it all off Chan starts pouting after he fully inspects Jeonghan’s work. Jeonghan knows that if he coos at him like he wants to, Chan would probably push him off of his stool. So he keeps quiet and inwardly coos at the cute pouty lips, rounded cheeks, and furrowed brow of his youngest, oldest friend.

“I mean what the hell are you doing with _paint_?” Chan spits out the last word like its poison.

Jeonghan looks down at his hands, the black paint smeared across his fingertips and the cute half-painted jack-o’-lantern he was just rudely interrupted in making.

“I’m _painting_ with the paint,” Jeonghan says slowly, watching in amusement as Chan’s pout intensifies to a full on scowl and he actually lets out a puff of air in frustration.

“Why aren’t you carving jack-o’-lanterns, though?” he asks.

Jeonghan looks at him with his best _you’ve-got-to-be-fucking-kidding-me_ face. “Are you actually kidding me?” he asks. “Jisoo wants like fifty pumpkins; you can’t expect me to _carve_ them all!”

“That’s why we’re doing it together, hyung.”

“Even with two people carving, I don’t think we can get fifty by tomorrow.”

Chan crosses his arms and squints at Jeonghan. “You doubt my skills.”

“And you doubt my laziness,” Jeonghan counters. “Let’s just paint the rest of them and deal with Jisoo’s wrath tomorrow.”

Chan shakes his head, hard enough that the hair on top of his head gets ruffled by the movement.

“I refuse.”

Jeonghan shrugs and returns to his own pumpkin. “Have it your way, then.”

The two friends work together and silence stretches between them as Jeonghan paints and Chan carves, which is odd for the two of them. Chan hates silence and Jeonghan is self-aware enough to know that he likes the sound of his own voice, so they never really had a problem with silence between them, even when they fight. They could talk about anything and everything, sometimes even complete nonsense. It worked, the two of them. Even when Jeonghan teased Chan and called him a baby, even when Chan talked back to Jeonghan and called him old. It was comfortable, hell Jeonghan even _liked _it.

So he sighs, deciding to throw away his honor if it means that Chan will talk to him instead of giving him the silent treatment. Even though he’s finished more pumpkins than Chan, and his painting skills are better than Chan’s carving skills. Goddammit, he’s a good hyung.

“I’ve never carved a pumpkin before,” Jeonghan admits softly while pretending to fix the perfect toothy smile on his sixth jack-o’-lantern.

He expects Chan to smirk at him, knowing that they’ve gone much longer than just a few minutes without talking when they’re mad at each other and Jeonghan hates folding first, but when he glances over to look at him Chan looks concerned.

“Never?” he asks.

Jeonghan shakes his head. “Nope. Mom hated messes. You know that.”

Chan puts his hand on his chest in mock horror. “Oh my god. Well, we have to fix that right now!”

Jeonghan watches as Chan reaches down into his backpack and pulls out a box. Chan shoves the box in Jeonghan’s hands and gestures for him to open it. Slowly, Jeonghan does so, finding a complete set of pumpkin carving knives and other tools exactly like the ones Chan had been using neatly placed in the box. Chan grins at him.

“Looks like I’m going to give you your first lesson.”

Jeonghan wrinkles his nose. “I’d honestly rather just paint them. I take after my Mom, I think I’m already messy enough,” he tells Chan, eyeing the younger who’s covered in pumpkin guts up to his elbows.

“But hyung, we’re supposed to make jack-o’-lanterns, which are actually carved not painted. Like, it’s in the definition and everything. You can’t paint a pumpkin and call it a jack-o’-lantern. That’s blasphemy.”

Jeonghan rolls his eyes, placing the pumpkin carving tools on the table and picking up his next pumpkin. “I think you’re exaggerating.”

“Please hyung,” Chan asks, turning on his puppy dog eyes for maximum effect. “Please? It’ll be fun, I swear!”

Jeonghan considers himself a master manipulator. From being charming to seductive to having his own pair of powerful puppy dog eyes, Jeonghan is used to getting what he wants and rarely lets others get in the way of that. In this instance, Jeonghan wants to slap paint on the remaining 40 pumpkins and be done with it, and he’d usually use any one of his manipulative skills to do so. But Chan, his friend since they were kids and swimming with floaties and camping out in each others’ backyards, has been learning from Jeonghan all of these years and Jeonghan might admit that in this instance, the student may have outshone the teacher.

Letting out a curse, Jeonghan finds himself nodding. _Anything _to not have Chan look at him like that.

Chan gives a victory cheer and put aside the pumpkin he was working on to get two fresh ones for Chan to teach Jeonghan how to make a proper jack-o’-lantern.

“Let’s take your jack-o’-lantern virginity!”

The process, surprisingly, isn’t as messy or gross as Jeonghan had imagined. Stabbing the pumpkin was actually kind of therapeutic, let out some of his pent up frustration for being roped into this stupid project in the first place. Gutting out the pumpkin is still a little gross but luckily Chan does most of that step for him. Chan also urges him to carve the face free hand, without drawing on the pumpkin as a guide.

“It gives it character,” Chan explains.

And Jeonghan’s first jack-o’-lantern sure had some ‘character’. The eyes are mismatched in size and the nose is pretty crooked. Jeonghan takes a step back and nope, it still looks bad from farther away.

“I’m calling this one Jisoo,” Jeonghan tells Chan before placing his first jack-o’-lantern in the finished pile and reaching for another to start.

Chan giggles before going diving back into his current pumpkin. Jeonghan takes in his friend, tongue peaking out of the corner of his mouth in concentration. He’s missed this, he realizes. Since Jeonghan went away to college, most of their interactions had been through text or quick hangouts during breaks. He’s missed just spending time with one of his best friends, even if he is getting messy in the process.

Time goes by quickly after that, now that Chan isn’t giving him the silent treatment. They chat about home and school and the frat. It’s nice, even relaxing for Jeonghan to just let himself be. By the time they finish carving all of the pumpkins, they collectively have enough ugly jack-o’-lanterns named after each one of their friends. It’s a feat Jeonghan is actually quite proud of.

As they giggle over the ‘Seokmin’ jack-o’-lantern with the too-wide mouth, Seungcheol shuffles into the kitchen and heads straight to the cabinet to grab a cup.

“What are you guys still doing up?” he asks, barely stifling a yawn as he fills his cup with water. Or well, he tries to. There’s fifty jack-o’-lanterns shoved into the small kitchen and they had to get creative with where to put their finished masterpieces around number 20. So Seungcheol actually looks in the sink, slowly takes the jack-o’-lantern out of it (Jeonghan stifles a laugh because he’d picked up the ‘Seungcheol’ pumpkin and the resemblance is uncanny) and just stands there because every other surface of the kitchen is covered in orange.

Seungcheol turns to scowl at Jeonghan, so Jeonghan sheepishly looks at his phone. Shit, it’s almost 2 am.

“Well you know me, overachiever,” Jeonghan jokes, already gathering up the tools they’d been using.

Both Seungcheol and Chan scoff, which makes Jeonghan pout.

“C’mon! I have a good work ethic!”

“Then why’d you leave this,” Seungcheol says, gesturing with the hollowed out pumpkin in his hands, “until the night before Jisoo needs them?”

“That’s my fault,” Chan pipes up. He hops off of his stool and walks around the table to take the jack-o’-lantern from Seungcheol so he can finally get his water.

“I asked hyung to help me with one of my projects.”

“You know there’s more suitable people in the frat than Jeonghan to help you, right?” Seungcheol asks over Jeonghan’s protests. “Like Mingyu. He’s got really good grades. Hell, even Soonyoung—”

Chan shrugs. “I’ve known hyung for so long, though. He gets me and it’s really easy to work with him.”

At Chan’s words, Jeonghan puts down the knife he’d been low-key thinking about _lightly_ stabbing Seungcheol with. Chan has dyslexia and has a hard time with spelling, even with auto-correct. And after years of deciphering the younger’s texts and high school papers, Jeonghan is pretty good at helping Chan proofread his essays.

“That’s why I’m helping him in the first place. He helped me so I said I’d help with the jack-o’-lanterns for Jisoo-hyung.”

Seungcheol shrugs and starts making his way back out of the kitchen.

“Please don’t leave the kitchen a mess,” the frat president says before he leaves, “and see you Saturday, Chan.”

“See you then, hyung!” Chan replies cheerily, setting the jack-o’-lantern precariously on top of two others.

The two friends wordlessly start to clean up their mess, moving around each other seamlessly while Chan cleans off his carving tools at the sink and Jeonghan puts away his paint and throws out the newspaper they had spread over the table and floors. After making sure the kitchen is clean, they start carrying the pumpkins out to Jeonghan’s car.

The trunk gets filled first, then soon the backseat, and when Jeonghan pulls out of his parking spot to take Chan back to his dorm, the freshman has two pumpkins in his lap as well.

“Thanks for helping me today, Channie,” Jeonghan tells his friend. “And for teaching me to make jack-o’-lanterns.”

“No problem. It was actually kind of fun.”

“It was!” he agrees.

Jeonghan quickly steals a glance at Chan in the passenger’s seat. It’s only now that Jeonghan can see the tiredness on Chan’s face while he looks lazily out the window at their little college town. Jeonghan frowns.

“Hey Chan, can I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“Did you only pledge Sigma Nu Tau because I’m in it?”

Chan doesn’t answer and Jeonghan’s too focused on the slow-moving car in front of him (he can’t break too hard or he’s pretty sure he’ll accidentally smash a couple pumpkins) so he doesn’t chance another look over to the now quiet passenger’s seat.

“I just don’t want you to overwork yourself. I know with classes and everything, you already have a lot on your plate and all the frat stuff takes up a lot of time, too. You don’t have to be a frat bro just to hang out with me. You know that, right?”

Chan sighs. “You’re such a narcissist.”

“Hey! Respect your elders!” Jeonghan snaps.

They reach Chan’s dorm and Jeonghan quickly kills the engine to face the freshman.

“I didn’t join the frat to spend time with you,” Chan explains. “Just…I’ve spent the last three years hearing about your friends in the frat and I guess I thought it was pretty cool. That you could make friends, like actual brothers. And I thought maybe I’d make friends by pledging. And I did! Me and Minhyuk want to room together next year and all the hyungs in the house are really nice, too! It’s not too much. I can handle it.”

Jeonghan sighs. The kid sitting next to him isn’t such a kid anymore. When he’d left for school three years ago, Chan had been tiny and intensely shy. He really only talked to Jeonghan outside of school and that was because they were neighbors and grew up together. But the young man sitting next to him is older, taller, more mature. He doesn’t need Jeonghan to hold his hand through life anymore. It makes Jeonghan a little sad, but then he chides himself for thinking that Chan was the same teenager he’d hung out with at home three years ago. That’s stupid. They’re both adults now.

“Okay,” Jeonghan tells him. “Okay. I’m sorry I underestimated you.”

“Just don’t do it again,” Chan threatens him before bursting out into a grin. Jeonghan finds himself grinning back.

And this time, Jeonghan can’t help it. He reaches forward and pokes at Chan’s cheek while he coos at his friend for being so cute and pure, even as an adult. Chan doesn’t hesitate to swat Jeonghan’s hand away, his face shifting immediately into a scowl.

“Alright, get out of my car, you cretin!” Jeonghan shoos the other out of his car, still laughing at Chan’s facial expression and taking joy at the fact that he can still rile up Chan like that. They have to carefully rearrange the pumpkins he’d had in his lap onto the empty seat after he hops out.

“Bye hyung, thanks for the ride! See you on Saturday for the party!” Chan tells him before slamming the door.

“Hey!” Jeonghan rolls his window down to yell at the freshman trying to make his escape to his dorm. “You have to help me set these up at the auditorium tomorrow!”

Chan’s only response is a loud cackle that Jeonghan hates he finds endearing.


End file.
